Hello everybody! This post describes satellite transponders (DVB-S/S2) blind scan with Joker TV’s universal USB DTV receiver.  Firstly, I will show you the blind scan results and other cool stuff that you can get. Below are the technical details.

DVB-S/S2 blind scan with Joker TV

Blind scan is a useful feature for when you want to get all available transponders broadcasted from a satellite. This method will give you the full actual information compared to the list of transponders available on the internet. Here is a blind scan result for Ku-band of HotBird 13E satellite obtained in Belgium by Alexander Deryugin

As you can see, Joker TV has found all peaks on spectrum and detected their standard, modulation, symbol rate, FEC, pilot. Spectrums were obtained for four quadrants that cover all available bands:

* LNB power 13V, 22kHz tone off. This gives us vertical/right polarization and lower band of LNB (9750MHz local oscillator was used).

* LNB power 13V, 22kHz tone on. This gives us vertical/right polarization and higher band of LNB (10600MHz local oscillator was used).

* LNB power 18V, 22kHz tone off. This gives us horizontal/left polarization and lower band of LNB (9750MHz local oscillator was used).

* LNB power 18V, 22kHz tone on. This gives us horizontal/left polarization and higher band of LNB (10600MHz local oscillator was used).

All locked transponders are parsed and available services such as TV or Radio channels are dumped. Here is the full file result for HotBird 13E satellite with 1931 services found. In addition below, is a short snippet of services found (more than 1900 !):

$ egrep "program number=" 13E.xml | head
 <program number="4314" name="Polo TV">
 <program number="4315" name="ESKA TV">
 <program number="4316" name="Mango 24">
 <program number="4317" name="NUTA TV">
 <program number="4321" name="FOKUS TV">
 <program number="4323" name="Puls 2">
 <program number="4324" name="NTL">
 <program number="4325" name="NOWA TV">
 <program number="4326" name="ESKA TV Extra">
 <program number="4327" name="POWER TV">

We did not know anything about satellite but after the blind scan we had an actual full list of transponders and services. This is a great improvement for satellite television users and enthusiasts.

How to run a blind scan with Joker TV

First of all, connect your satellite dish to your Joker TV; then you are ready to start the blind scan with the following commands:

./joker-tv -z 9750,10600,11700 –blind –blind-out 13E.csv –blind-power 13E –blind-programs 13E.xml

Here we have defined our LNB parameters (usually marked on LNB itself) ‘-z 9750,10600,11700‘ and also specified the filenames for the result ‘ –blind-out 13E.csv –blind-power 13E –blind-programs 13E.xml‘.

The blind scan will take 5-20 minutes depending on the satellite spectrum. For example, HotBird 13E blind scan takes about 4 minutes, but the Galaxy-18 123W takes 15 minutes. When the blind scan finishes, you should see the resulting files in the current directory:

13E.csv 
13E.xml
13E-SS1-13v-lnb_10600.csv 
13E-SS1-13v-lnb_9750.csv 
13E-SS1-18v-lnb_10600.csv 
13E-SS1-18v-lnb_9750.csv

Files ’13E.xml’ and ’13E.csv’ contains all detected transponders and services. Other csv files contain power values and will be used for spectrum graphs drawing. A special shell script was prepared and we can draw such spectrums with the following command:

./tools/plot-spectrum.sh -y 13 -p 13E-SS1-13v-lnb_9750.csv -l 13E.csv -o 13E-SS1-13v-lnb_9750.png

That’s all for now. Happy blind scanning ! 🙂